Former Emmerdale star Kelvin Fletcher and his wife, Liz, explain on James Martin’s show how pandemic visa issues derailed their American move, leading to their farming series
Kelvin Fletcher and his wife, Liz, harboured ambitions of relocating to America before opting to manage a farm, though their plans were scuppered by the COVID pandemic. During an appearance on James Martin’s cooking show, the pair revealed that running their own farm had never been part of their original vision.
When James offered his congratulations on their new series, Kelvin shared: “The back end of last year, we finished series three, and then we’re already straight on with series four, so that’s coming out very soon.”
The TV chef remarked: “So you can’t really complain about it because it was your idea to do the filming in the first place.”
The former soap star responded: “We just kind of thought, it’s hopefully of interest. It’s interesting to us and our journey into farming and to this new life, and then, we kind of pitched the idea, and thankfully, ITV thought it was a good idea, too, and four series later, we’re still doing it.”
Shifting focus to their abandoned American dream, James noted, “Just to recap, the reason why you got the farm in the first place was no reason whatsoever. You were originally going to go to America. This was a life-changing thing you decided, and you got the visas and everything, didn’t you?”, reports the Express.
Liz interjected: “As two actors, we thought, you know, Kelvin had been in Emmerdale for 20 years, and we kind of wanted to try something different, and as two actors, we thought, ‘Well, why not? Let’s go to Hollywood and LA and see what happens’.
“And we only had two children at the time, but unfortunately, Covid stopped that, and they actually stopped the visas. We never got the visas completed because they said, ‘There’ll be a pause on this for at least two years’.
“But we’d mentally moved on, hadn’t we? We sold the house, and we were like, ‘Well, what are we going to do now?’ And that’s when we saw the farm, and it’s literally that that sprung the idea.”
Despite portraying a farmer in Emmerdale, Kelvin admitted they had no prior farming experience whatsoever.
“That’s the irony, James, is that I was playing a farmer for 20 years, but as you’ll know, with soaps, we did very little farming,” he revealed.
“It was more, I think, shooting people with shotguns, going to prison, getting married three or four times. That I was more accustomed to, but when you think of it like that, it sounds crazy, but kind of life has imitated art, and that’s a little bit of what people used to say, there’s an obvious connection there.
“You played a farmer in Emmerdale, you’re not living this farming life, and we’d never seen it like that.”
Kelvin continued, “You know, as Liz said, we’d had this dream of going to America. It didn’t kind of pan out. And from Los Angeles to the Peak District, it’s probably not an obvious connection.”
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